In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Pending Matters
  • David William Foster (bio)

Necessarily—and, indeed, almost as an imperative—one takes advantage of writing a note such as this to promote an intellectual agenda. Our selection process for these essays on film has been an interesting and rather anomalous one, since we each examined a range of possible contributions, without knowing what the overall pool of topics might be beyond just those each of us saw individually. This made it difficult for any one of us to favor a particular range of submissions—that is, to nudge the selection process towards any one individual’s intellectual agenda. Of course, I might have favored the essays I did see that matched that agenda, but the process was complex and anonymous enough for me to have been of little influence in that regard. As a consequence, I recognize that the final list of essays accepted was highly aleatory, even if it was designed to result in an overarching consensus as regards a selection of the very best, no matter how they distributed themselves thematically or intellectually.

Ours is a conjunctive organization, Spanish and Portuguese, and it is possible to debate what the implications of that conjunction are. For those of us working in Brazilian studies (and I am fully aware of the way in which I am an unabashed interloper, not having been fully trained as a Brazilianist and counting myself primarily as an Argentinist), the conjunction here has served always to mark a fundamental disjunction: one was either a Hispanist or one was a Luso-Brazilianist. Hispanists and Brazilianists were brought together in the same organization for geohistorical reasons, but not because their research agendas overlapped, and it has been, with few exceptions, only in recent years that doctoral students—at least in research extensive universities where Portuguese is likely to be taught—are emerging with a solid grounding in both areas, or, at least, with a decent familiarity across the conjunction. Integrated projects, of the sort envisioned by the Beyond Tordesillas initiative, still are quite lacking, although one is confident that they will eventually prosper.

It is, therefore, with regret that I note the lack of a substantial set of essays on Brazilian film in our final roster: only one deals with Brazil. I do not know what Brazilian film submissions were examined and, in the end, rejected, although I am willing to be firmly convinced that rejections were for reasons of critical deficiency and not out of any desire to slight Brazil (or Portugal)! While the Portuguese film industry remains modest (especially in comparison to Spain), there can be no doubting the vigor of film in Brazil. And unlike Mexico, where it is difficult to view a Mexican film in general because commercial and art house bookings favor a heavy preponderance of foreign films (e.g., US films in the former case), almost any Cineplex in Brazil’s major cities includes national titles. To be sure, the Brazilian film industry is uniquely different—but, then, so are the Argentine, the Mexican, the Cuban ones—and glitzy commercial productions (very much as part of a continuum with the television industry; the so-called O Globo network phenomenon) figure prominently, and these are not usually likely to attract serious critical analyses except within a sociology of culture context. Although Mexico has a certain amount [End Page 385] of such titles—mostly recently, something like Pedro Pablo Ibarra’s A la mala (2015)—they have largely faded into the background in Argentina, with the very vigorous putatively serious filmmaking now coming out of that country, and, of course, they have not existed in Cuba since the Revolution. But serious filmmaking is thriving in Brazil, and it merits the same level of interpretive scrutiny as the Hispanic materials that rose to the top of our complex selection process.

Another gap in our final inventory—and here, I can legitimately claim a position of disciplinary centrality—concerns queer filmmaking. I don’t mean just films in which theme and characters are manifestly queer-centered, but rather, the application of queer film theory to the entire corpus: I am much more interested in a queer analysis of the Mexican legendary...

pdf

Share